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Revenant as Erosion: Poetry Micro-Sequence
Six-Poem Sequence of Revenant as Erosion.
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Poems from the Afterlife
By Lily Selthofner and Jessa (Faye) Moverman
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Afterlives
Afterlives View the full album here
Afterlives is a series that walks the viewer through the minds of mortals, bringing together interviews, music, and poetry, dance, and film. Each track touches on life’s most unanswerable, yet compelling, question: What happens after death? Afterlives is in collaboration with over 40 talented artists and interviewees.
View the full credits list here
The premise of Afterlives is simple: I asked strangers in NYC, California, and Wisconsin, as well as family and friends, what they think happens after we die. Each person’s response gets its own segment, set to music with an accompanying short film. Watched in order, the series is interspersed with poetry and narrations that build an emotional continuity and contemplation, that arcs through the interviewee’s discourses on death.
In the process of creation, I considered my main goal to be sonic, with ‘visual accompaniment,’ instead of what is often vice-versa in our visual culture. The ears are the last sense to go when we die, and inform our reality, never blinking. Pythagoras lectured from behind a curtain to take advantage of the ear’s power to listen. That’s why for Afterlives, the soundtrack can standalone as an album — the popularity of music and podcasts through today’s headphones offers a powerful place for art and interview to merge together during everyday moments, encouraging presentness and reckoning with mortality. The videos use the circularity, repetition, and building of music to add emotional depth to the spoken audios on death.
The total album is around 90 minutes, with each of the 30 tracks averaging 2.5 minutes. Some are more instrumental, factual, poetic, or emotional than others. Each track is a mosaic within a mosaic — the accompanying video splices together locations, moods, and choreographies that light up the viewer’s own imaginative realms of meditative peace and future dreams, in between one’s physical and spiritual bodies. Oceans and bluffs merge with snowy winters and soft sunsets. If you stumble across one track from this series, you will be pleasantly surprised to find there are more along each theme, and many more that offer a different viewpoint, weaving together.
I felt each response deserved its full time, and was best understood when each person’s response was kept whole and un-fragmented. Initially, I had thought to blend them all together into the audio for a whirling visual story. However, the anthropologist in me sought to highlight each response’s own epistemic merit. My creativity could best accentuate them by accompanying and juxtaposing, rather than by morphing the very nature of the responses.
The end result is a 90 minute album that can be watched and listened to as a whole or in small pieces. The soul-touching sentiments of everyday people on the question of mortality are laid in flowerbeds of music, nature, and dance, in an artistic docu-series that resounds strongly with the truths we hold dear, and unknowns we foray into, as human beings, who walk this Earth step in step together until every last one of us meets our mortal fate.
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Viscerale Spirito – Poetry Collection
Eight poems by Lily Selthofner – Italian with English Translations – featured in Venezia Scalzo Screendance
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Art on Dimensions: Selections and Essay
Visual arts selections:
screen shot 2023 06 14 at 2.28.13 am Poetry Selections:
Essay:
This selection of visual art and poetry pieces articulates themes which occur throughout life — namely the paradoxes/portals lying amongst the dimensions of ‘here and now,’ and in the border between mundane and universal imaginative spaces. My artwork is often inspired by the various planes of existence that we dream through in our day-to-day lives. We indulge in potentialities, weaving in and out of various lucidities to co-construct reality with one another. For example, my pieces “9th Dimension” and “10th Dimension” are explorative documentations of a recurring dream I had in 2020. Dreamscape demands a contemplation of interconnectedness — the space between ourselves and every other thing is fundamentally similar, existing within and beyond awareness.
Similarly, my piece “Our House” is a form and structure emerging from a loose watercolor wash wherein I attempt to literally draw out the feelings of home — an animate idea shared in our collective memories. Here, the loose colors of ‘house’ is the space which births the lines of ‘home,’ complementary yet self-transcendent. “Latent” more specifically explores the choreography of art-making. The piece’s name, and form, are reminiscent of the late-night energies it was created with. The process of creating this piece was a meditative dance, concretized in paint, bringing the ephemeral into the physical, acting as a portal in a way.
In “Breath,” I am reflecting on the collective pandemic trauma’s physicalization in space. The piece was inspired by the textures and forms of various cloth masks that I have — the two vertical lines represent both elastic ear-pieces on masks, and two socially distanced people — both of which are physically separated but vitally united in effort. A mouth-like liminality emerges as these two lines define and transcend boundaries between the internal and external, from the cellular to the societal.
As for the poems, “Fawning From Vitality,” is an exploration of temporalities. Reflecting on the smallness of the present in the grandiosity of existence, it is an attempt to cope with the fatigue of searching for meaning across temporal leaps and bounds. Likewise, “Refraction” is an exploration of spatiality. I wrote this poem on the subway, as my environment refracted into multiplicities of spatial existences of myself, and my fellow-train car passengers. Where the subway train becomes the ancient earthworm, I sifted through the desires and delusions that fill the gaps between ‘here’ and ‘there’ on these mundane paths — offering portals into imaginative infinities.
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Earthly Romances
A poem by Lily Selthofner.
What A Weird Place to End Up in by Lily Selthofner. the sun grew in two sizes
and the flowers became mountains.
teetering above
little ants orbiting summer skin
mistakes float on falling leaves
aching knees
marching westward
towards redemption
sorting open skies
with thunder breaths
and forgiving dances
antsy steps into vastness.
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The Appeal of Cremation
A poem by Lily Selthofner, 2021.
Photo by Lily Selthofner, 2016. release into the smoke
ashy fiery flames
burn the same as ancient wood.
a rising phoenix
or a slow decompose
earthy wormey dirt
breaks down my baby bones.
an immortal transition
away from life’s debt
face melting, skin burning
maggots fill the lily.
inhale, exhale, stop.
which to choose:
to fly or to rot.
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Creek
A poem by Lily Selthofner, 2021.
A Small Crossing by Lily Selthofner time, insurmountable and irrelevant
children, innocent and…We are love
able, craving simple warmth in tumultuous weather…
sharp edges drawing silent blood.
a future with… a present without
I pour from a cup filled with riveting ocean waves
sending sprinkles from afar
with uncertainty, may we dive.
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Washed Out
A poem by Lily Selthofner, 2021.
Eastern Horizon by Lily Selthofner. the same force that rolls waves upon the shore
sweetens breeze and echoes arial song
the backbone
brushes a woman’s dress as she walks
and screeches to her silent serenade
early ocean foam carries scavengers
little trinkets:
wind-washed seashells
casting little shadows in the late morning sun.
the waves ricochet
in fortune days
hiding empty messages from above
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The Mystery of the Future
A poem by Lily Selthofner, 2022.
Photo by Lily Selthofner, 2022. cyclical, seasonal
what burden to bear?
the weight may sparsely disappear
ease
spots trouble in the distance
the telescope of uncertainty
smeared with the fog of conditioning
sticky fingers wiping away
attachment to the good, bad, looming and lingering
in favor of a lighter next time.
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Recycling
A poem by Lily Selthofner, 2021.
Photo by Lily Selthofner, 2022. a looming threat manifests
in each gray moment unspent
simply sedated, devoid of sacred
anxiously awaited in bed.
sometimes,
I miss when things were fun and easy.
sometimes,
things are fun and easy.
the breeze ties your hair back
so you see, clearly
the universe is giving.
‘wasting away’
is gathering the strength
to sink into ease again.
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Refraction
A poem by Lily Selthofner, 2021.
Breath by Lily Selthofner people all around me
are they hurting, are they healing?
are they writing, are they reading?
are they feeling, seeing
the world through which they hurry?
an imperfectly manicured journey, scrolling vulnerability
as complex opacity confuses passerby
eyes blinded by neon lights
while hands
grasp towards what is transparent.
Do you belong here:
in the city, on the street?
or with ancient earthworms digging under your feet?
may we see each other in timeless hues, idle mysteries uncovered.
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Curiosity
A poem by Lily Selthofner, 2021.
Photo by Lily Selthofner, 2022. wheels push the days into months
learned figures of god to follow
reality left unswallowed
loving hugs to marvel
with memories of source preceding,
beauty lingering
may each young vessel of potentiality
emerge unscathed, wrapped in the knowledge of birdsong
into each coming day and month
a baby, growing old
growing up.
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Concrete Talons
A poem by Lily Selthofner, January 13, 2022.
Photo by Lily Selthofner, 2022. scavenging
little moments of daydream escape.
from school bus to subway train
I travel
to and from the same location.
roads paved, from rural hometowns
to massive Manhattan highways
everyone waits
for the light to change.
We are all the same.
Fill my backpack with your labored desires,
so you may rest. sweet relief
remains submissive
to the beck and call of heavy traffic.
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Fatigues
A poem by Lily Selthofner, November 7, 2021.
Numbness by Lily Selthofner. hunger left unsatiated
by an empty break.
berate the day–
arrive late
to every calling.
a fragile child
gripping heavy wrists
tackles an impossible option–
feel or function?
stagger through the thick mud of self-hatred
reach for the door–
before the enemy consumes.
bland years stink of decay
the soldier remains
shackled to the frail bed frame.
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Seven Minutes
A poem by Lily Selthofner, 2021.
Photo by Lily Selthofner, 2022. decibels sway,
ache and echo.
overwhelming,
sentimental.
rolling wheels screech.
ebb and flow
effervescent urban glow
alarms the tired benches of gray halls,
weeping into blankets
of cold, timeless boredom.
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Full Moon in Aries
A poem by Lily Selthofner, Oct. 2021.
A Constellation by Lily Selthofner don’t part
from dreams. open eyes
release
anxiety
one foot forward
the other lingers
behind
until the next swing.
a dip plunging in
seek refuge in its entirety
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Climbing, Lost
A poem by Lily Selthofner, November 2, 2021, Manhattan, NY.
An Optimistic, Nostalgic Tree by Lily Selthofner ‘Uphill battles should never be climbed –
alone.
find a perch, enjoy the view
nostalgic perceptions
wander towards the present
where I may seek to take an easy step with you.’
